As part of the celebration of the Christmas season, it is a tradition to bring a pine or evergreen tree into the home and decorate it with ornaments, lights, garland, tinsel, and the like. Natural trees, however, can be quite expensive and are recognized by some as a waste of environmental resources. In addition, natural trees can be messy, leaving both sap and needles behind after removal. Natural trees are typically watered to prevent drying and to minimize the fire hazard associated with dry needles and branches. Each year a natural tree is purchased and decorated and, at the end of the Christmas season, the lights and decorations are removed. At the end of the season, natural trees often are disposed in landfills, further stressing these environments.
To overcome the disadvantages of a natural Christmas tree, yet still incorporate a tree into the holiday celebration, a great variety of artificial Christmas trees are available. For the most part, these artificial trees are assembled for use, decorated, and disassembled after use. Artificial Christmas trees have the advantage of being useable over a period of years and thereby eliminate the annual expense of purchasing live trees for the short holiday season. Further, they help reduce the chopping down of trees for a temporary decoration, and the subsequent disposal, typically in a landfill, of same.
In many natural and artificial trees, a light string may be manually attached to the tree and rearranged to achieve a bulb spacing that is pleasing to the eye. Often each light string will include a certain color of bulb, or a mixture of bulb colors. To provide interesting and pleasing illumination variations, switching power distribution controllers, bulbs with internal blinkers, optical fiber lighting systems, and other lighting options have been designed and are available to provide a changing illumination pattern. A difficulty encountered with developing pleasing illumination patterns however involves changing the color of the pattern. Typically the colors are limited by the specific color LEDs used in the bulb.